Mobile agent-enabled framework for structuring and building distributed systems on the internet

Mobile agent has shown its promise as a powerful means to complement and enhance existing technology in various application areas. In particular, existing work has demonstrated that MA can simplify the development and improve the performance of certain classes of distributed applications, especially for those running on a wide-area, heterogeneous, and dynamic networking environment like the Internet. In our previous work, we extended the application of MA to the design of distributed control functions, which require the maintenance of logical relationship among and/or coordination of proc- essing entities in a distributed system. A novel framework is presented for structuring and building distributed systems, which use cooperating mobile agents as an aid to carry out coordination and cooperation tasks in distributed systems. The framework has been used for designing various distributed control functions such as load balancing and mutual ex- clusion in our previous work. In this paper, we use the framework to propose a novel ap- proach to detecting deadlocks in distributed system by using mobile agents, which dem- onstrates the advantage of being adaptive and flexible of mobile agents. We first describe the MAEDD (Mobile Agent Enabled Deadlock Detection) scheme, in which mobile agents are dispatched to collect and analyze deadlock information distributed across the network sites and, based on the analysis, to detect and resolve deadlocks. Then the design of an adaptive hybrid algorithm derived from the framework is presented. The algorithm can dynamically adapt itself to the changes in system state by using different deadlock detec- tion strategies. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated using simulations. The results show that the algorithm can outperform existing algorithms that use a fixed deadlock detection strategy.     

Recent advances on dynamic learning from adaptive NN control

Notice that intelligent control is developed based on the learning and control abilities of human beings. As such, an ideal intelligent control system should not only have the ability to adapt to complex dynamic environments, but also the ability to imitate human learning. The learning ability means to acquire the knowledge of uncertain closed-loop dynamics from dynamic environments, and use the stored experience knowledge to improve control performance [1,2]. Such an autonomous learning has been viewed as one of the most important and indispensable capabilities to achieve a high degree of system autonomy. The existing intelligent control schemes, including adaptive neural control and adaptive fuzzy control, are usually exclusively on the system stability by the use of online adjustment parameters to estimate the unknown dynamics, in which the exponential convergence of the estimated parameters is not a major concern. As a result, most of existing intelligent control schemes still need to readjust the controller parameters for the same or similar control tasks. In this sense, as shown in \cite{3}, the learning ability of intelligent control is actually very limited and still needs the further research. However, it is very challenging to acquire and express the knowledge of unknown dynamics in a nonstationary or dynamic environment....     

Information and Communication Technologies： A Way to Reduce Digital Illiteracy

The teaching-learning process may have several obstacles; one of those would be a cultural situation of students. When the author refers to cultural situation, the author means the language or dialect that they speak. In the state of Puebla, Mexico, there are primary schools where the courses are taught to students who do not speak Spanish and they only speak their own dialect. On the other hand, the use of information and communication technologies in primary schools in Puebla is a fact but a main concern in schools is that the languages in which they are operated are Spanish. To analyze this situation, the author finds that turns out to be very important and with a negative effect on both the implementation and acceptance of a multimedia program in these schools, generating a technological gap between students. The government efforts are decimated because of this cultural divide prevalent in many communities in the state of Puebla and the increase of this situation when considering the illiterate population.     

Integration of Computer Assisted Learning in Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools in Kenya

The purpose of this study was to establish factors that lead to poor integration of Information and communication technology （ICT） for teaching and learning in schools in Kenya, despite comprehensive policy, institutional, infrastructural frameworks and capacity building by the Ministry of Education. The subject of this study was administered by use of questionnaires in three categories of public schools： national school, provincial schools and district schools. The respondents were students from each level that is from one, two, three and four and teachers based on the most offered subjects in the secondary schools. The computer assisted learning facilities were classified into computers, internet and content in optical media. In national school Internet based research, optical media content provided by Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development and Cyber School program for science subjects was used in learning. In provincial school, it lacks adequate computers, reliable Internet and content in optical media. In district school, it lacks adequate computer, no internet connection and content in optical media. A learner management system which can be accessed by all learners by use of any internet access devices like mobile phone access will be an ideal tool with over 4,000,000 mobile phone subscribers currently in Kenya.     

Research on the Activity Frame Work of Using Visual Thinking Tools

The development of high order thinking has been considered as a national priority of learning. By using three iteration action research in six elementary schools in Guangzhou, China for about 1 year and a half, we found that visual thinking tools can improve students＇ high order thinking ability and change the traditional teaching method. By using this activity frame work, the teachers can better understand what are the students thinking about and the students can use the thinking tools to help themselves solve complex problems and discuss with other people. The reason we do this research is to improve the high-order thinking ability of primary student. In this paper, we summarize an activity frame work of using visual thinking tools to improve students thinking ability. And the frame work can be divided into three stages： preparatory stage, implementation stage and assessment stage. And different stage has different activity. Though this activity frame work is not perfect enough, we will improve it in our future study.     

Attentiveness: Design for Reactivity at Scale

Clients of reactive systems often change their priorities. For example, a human user of an email viewer may attempt to display a new message while a large attachment is already downloading. To the user, an email viewer that delayed display of the message would exhibit a failure analogous to priority inversion in real-time systems. We propose a new quality attribute, attentiveness, intended to provide a unified way to model the forms of redirection offered by application-level reactive systems to accommodate the changing priorities of their clients. Modeling attentiveness as a quality attribute provides systems designers with a single modeling framework for policy and architectural decisions to address trade-offs among criteria such as responsiveness, overall performance, behavioral predictability, and state consistency. Clients of the reactive system could be human users or system components. This latter possibility suggests that the modeling framework must support an appropriate kind of composability, which would enable it to support architectural design of attentive systems at scale. At the policy level, the framework models a diverse set of familiar redirection options including cancel, undo, defer, suspend/preempt, and ignore. At the architectural level, the framework includes a suite of concepts to support the design of attentive systems and the refactoring of existing systems to enhance attentiveness. These concepts include: (1) Distinguishing "short" operations (such as an event notification) from "long" operations (such as an unbounded data transfer over a network). (2) Technical means to encapsulate long operations to prevent interference with redirection. (3) Technical means to enable use of light-weight checkpoints to support redirection while executing "long" operations. (4) Consolidation of responsibility for redirection to a relatively small group of components in the system. Policy and architecture come together in the form of a set of positive and negative patterns for realizing attentive systems. These patterns are derived from case studies of attentiveness failures and successes. This paper summarizes the key concepts of attentiveness, including modeling and architecture. The concepts are assessed against a variety of case studies, including refactoring experiments and new development projects involving both human-system interaction (in a document editor) and system-system interaction (in a client-server application). A principal goal is to develop a modeling framework and set of associated practices that can guide incremental improvements in enhancing the attentiveness of both existing and new reactive systems.     

Use Case for the Development of a Mobile Learning Application

This paper presents use cases developed for a mobile learning application named MLEA （mobile learning environment adapter）, developed in collaboration with the Universidad do Vale do Rio dos Sinos-Unisinos, Brazil and UTP （Universidad Tecnologica de Panama）. MLEA allows users to access, through a single platform, courses in a content management system--Moodle. The objective of this project is to create a communication platform that allows users of Android based mobile devices to use services of the virtual campus of UTP. The work team is composed of six professors and researchers in Panama and three in Brazil, with voluntary students in both countries. A complete, step by step use case is documented, including requirement specifications, interface designs based on Android patterns, as well as programming patterns used for the communication between mobile devices and Moodle platform.     

A Dialectal Chinese Speech Recognition Framework

A framework for dialectal Chinese speech recognition is proposed and studied, in which a relatively small dialectal Chinese (or in other words Chinese influenced by the native dialect) speech corpus and dialect-related knowledge are adopted to transform a standard Chinese (or Putonghua, abbreviated as PTH) speech recognizer into a dialectal Chinese speech recognizer. Two kinds of knowledge sources are explored: one is expert knowledge and the other is a small dialectal Chinese corpus. These knowledge sources provide information at four levels: phonetic level, lexicon level, language level, and acoustic decoder level. This paper takes Wu dialectal Chinese (WDC) as an example target language. The goal is to establish a WDC speech recognizer from an existing PTH speech recognizer based on the Initial-Final structure of the Chinese language and a study of how dialectal Chinese speakers speak Putonghua. The authors propose to use context-independent PTH-IF mappings (where IF means either a Chinese Initial or a Chinese Final), context-independent WDC-IF mappings, and syllable-dependent WDC-IF mappings (obtained from either experts or data), and combine them with the supervised maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) acoustic model adaptation method. To reduce the size of the multi-pronunciation lexicon introduced by the IF mappings, which might also enlarge the lexicon confusion and hence lead to the performance degradation, a Multi-Pronunciation Expansion (MPE) method based on the accumulated uni-gram probability (AUP) is proposed. In addition, some commonly used WDC words are selected and added to the lexicon. Compared with the original PTH speech recognizer, the resulting WDC speech recognizer achieves 10-18% absolute Character Error Rate (CER) reduction when recognizing WDC, with only a 0.62% CER increase when recognizing PTH. The proposed framework and methods are expected to work not only for Wu dialectal Chinese but also for other dialectal Chinese languages and even other languages.     

Automated transformations from UML behavior models to contracts

In model driven architecture （MDA）, system requirements are first captured by UML （unified mod- eling language） use cases with sequence diagrams to describe their intended use and implemented by classes of objected-oriented languages in the subsequent design stages. It is important that the dynamic behavior specified by the sequence diagrams is in full compliance with the implementation classes. This paper proposes an auto- matic approach and tool support for generating class contracts, which define a precondition and a postcondition for each operation of the class. The former serves as a guard to ensure invocations of the operations respect the semantics introduced by the sequence diagrams, and the latter places the system in a legal state to facilitate the succeeding operation calls. The contracts can be easily mapped to code of an object-oriented language such as Java. Thus, the approach helps to bridge the gap between the requirements and design stages of system development process. We use our model transformation tool to first generate a UML protocol state machine from the sequence diagrams, and then derive the contracts for a controller class. The transformations take into account the concurrency and critical constructs of the respective UML diagrams.     

以培养学生创新能力为核心的《数据结构》教学方法研究

以培养学生创新能力为核心,针对《数据结构》教学过程,提出双主线的教学设计理念;构建体现创新思维为核心对数据结构课程的教学内容、教学模式和教学手段的三层教学框架;并针对实践教学环节构建包含数据结构实验教学、数据结构课程设计教学、创新大赛和科研项目开发的四级阶梯式实践教学体系。     

Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human–computer interaction

Online communities are becoming an accepted part of the lives of Internet users, although participation in these communities is dependent on the types of people that form them. Some of the online community’s members do not participate, people referred to as lurkers, whereas others who have been in the community for a long time, referred to as elders, participate regularly and support others. Understanding what drives these individuals and how they chose whether or not to participate will lead to online communities that thrive. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to describe what drives such individuals to carry out actions such as posting messages and adding content (level 1), the cognitions they use to determine whether or not to take such actions (level 2) and the means by which they go about carrying out the action in the environment (level 3). Finally, the framework is applied to the problem of encouraging members to participate by discussing the methods by which people can be persuaded to participate by changing the way they interpret their desires and their environment.     

独立院校大学计算机基础教学的问题及解决方法

大学生计算机水平是衡量学生综合能力的手段之一,三本独立院校应该如何培养学生的计算机基础能力,根据自己多年的一线教育经历,提出三本院校当前计算机基础教育过程中存在的问题．并对解决这些问题提出几点建议。     

独立院校大学计算机基础教学的问题及解决方法

大学生计算机水平是衡量学生综合能力的手段之一,三本独立院校应该如何培养学生的计算机基础能力,根据自己多年的一线教育经历,提出三本院校当前计算机基础教育过程中存在的问题,并对解决这些问题提出几点建议。     

Teacher regulation of multiple computer-supported collaborating groups

Teachers regulating groups of students during computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) face the challenge of orchestrating their guidance at student, group, and class level. During CSCL, teachers can monitor all student activity and interact with multiple groups at the same time. Not much is known about the way teachers diagnose student progress and decide upon appropriate interventions when they regulate multiple groups synchronously. This explorative study describes the strategies and experiences related to regulating the activities of seven groups of students, as reported by two teachers, and aimed to widen the framework for describing teacher regulation of CSCL settings that are characterized by synchronicity. Recurring themes included the high amount of information load teachers experienced while diagnosing students’ needs, the focus and level of regulation, and the way the teachers used prior knowledge of students to decide on an intervention after diagnosis. Both teachers valued the ability to monitor student progress online, and mentioned the necessity of students being able to follow the teacher’s activity as well. Theoretical implications are described in terms of understanding teacher regulation, synchronicity, and information load. Practical implications are described for lowering information load.     

Coalescing individual and collaborative learning to model user linguistic competences

A linguistic, pedagogic and technological framework for an ICALL system called COPPER is presented here, where individual and collaborative learning are combined within a constructivist approach to facilitate second language learning. Based upon the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the ability to use language is viewed as one of several cognitive competences that are mobilised and modified when individuals communicate. To combine the different types of learning underlying the European Framework, a student model has been developed for COPPER that represents linguistic competences in a detailed way, combining high granularity expert-centric Bayesian networks with multidimensional stereotypes, and is updated following student activities semi-automatically. Instances of this model are used by an adaptive group formation algorithm that dynamically generates communicative groups based upon the linguistic capabilities of available students, and a collection of collaborative activity templates. As well as the student model, which is a representation of individual linguistic knowledge, preferences, etc., there is a group model, which is a representation of how a set of students works together. The results of a student’s activity within a group are evaluated by a student monitor, with more advanced linguistic competences, thereby sidestepping the difficulties present when using NLP techniques to automatically analyse non-restricted linguistic production. The monitor role empowers students and further consolidates what has been previously learnt. Students therefore initially work individually in this framework on certain linguistic concepts, and subsequently participate in authentic collaborative communicative activities, where their linguistic competences can develop approximately as they would in ‘real foreign language immersion experiences’.     

Gender-differences in Self-efficacy ICT related to various ICT-user profiles in Finland and Norway. How do self-efficacy,gender and ICT-user profiles relate to findings from PISA 2006

In this paper, we explored the relationship between self-efficacy, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) user profiles, and gender. Self-efficacy is an important theoretical and empirical concept to identify and describe how students perceive their own ability to solve a task. ICT user profiles were developed as an empirical framework to identify and categorize students based on how frequent they use ICT. In this paper, we have chosen six ICT user profiles in order to distinguish between leisure activities and school activities. Each ICT user-profile was computed by combining two dimensions (frequency of ICT use for leisure purposes and frequency of ICT use for school purposes). We tried to identify how students’ perception of their ability to solve a task is related to both their gender and how frequently they use ICT. The results showed that student’s self-efficacy varied between the ICT user profiles. The findings showed how an increased level of self-efficacy in ICT High-level tasks is related to both an increased level of leisure use and with an increased level of educational use. Further, our findings provided evidence in support of positive relationships (for both males and the females) between Self-efficacy in ICT and the ICT user profiles.     

Problem solving, planning ability and sharing processes with LOGO

The present research examined the impact of a Logo environment on the level of problem solving control, modification of planning ability and sharing processes in pairs and individual learners. Forty-five fifth-grade students (ranging in age from 10 to 11 years old, who studied in four classes), participated in the study. The subjects were randomly divided into fifteen pairs and fifteen individuals. Results showed significant differences in problem solving control between the Logo environment group and the comparison group. At the end of the treatment the degree of cooperative learning increased in the pairs groups. There was an effective modification of the subjects' planning ability in both pairs and individuals.     

Advanced forecasting of career choices for college students based on campus big data

Career indecision is a difficult obstacle confronting adolescents. Traditional vocational assessment research measures it by means of questionnaires and diagnoses the potential sources of career indecision. Based on the diagnostic outcomes, career counselors develop treatment plans tailored to students. However, because of personal motives and the architecture of the mind, it may be difficult for students to know themselves, and the outcome of questionnaires may not fully reflect their inner states and statuses. Self-perception theory suggests that students’ behavior could be used as a clue for inference. Thus, we proposed a data-driven framework for forecasting student career choice upon graduation based on their behavior in and around the campus, thereby playing an important role in supporting career counseling and career guidance. By evaluating on 10M behavior data of over four thousand students, we show the potential of this framework for this functionality.